


Cuckoo

by scioscribe



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), SPECTRE (2015), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Dark, Gen, Horror, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-23
Updated: 2015-11-23
Packaged: 2018-05-02 23:24:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5267774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Maybe he has always been the cuckoo in the nest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cuckoo

**Author's Note:**

> Be aware of the tags: this is dark-fic and horror. But if you're going to cast Christoph Waltz and give him a monologue about his terrifying chair full of psyche-destroying needles, you have to actually do something with it. Not remotely realistic, but neither is, well, a chair full of psyche-destroying needles in a base inside a crater.
> 
> Again: dark.

At first Bond seems fine.

One night, the bandage on the side of his scalp comes off and in the morning there is a crust of blood on his pillow. The stain is shaped like a swan.

Madeleine is sleeping beside him. He wakes her.

*

After that, he starts having trouble in the mornings, shaving. His hands are unerringly steady, but the face in the mirror is wrong. He is looking at a very accurate recreation of a person. (Franz puts a needle in his neck, says, _There is a fairytale about two brothers. One of the brothers took the other brother’s skin and wore it around his own. There, he said. This fits me better than it fits you. Do you like that story?_ ) Bond pictures neurons firing nonsense. He touches the ridges of his brow and the bow of his lips and learns to shave more carefully. He hardly ever cuts himself, which is strange, because his hands are more accustomed to bloodletting than to safety.

He looks at Madeleine’s ankle reflected in the mirror on the bathroom door. She’s still in bed. The sheets are disarrayed around her.

He has this feeling. _The author of all your pain._ Absent anything better to do, he goes back to London.

He gets permission to visit Oberhauser in his cell. He has trouble remembering that Oberhauser is not Silva. There are always people claiming to be his brothers.

Franz is smiling and his smile is mundane. “You have a fresh nick on your chin, James,” he says. “Whatever could have caused that?”

“You’ve done something.”

“Oh, have I? That’s fascinating, isn’t it? What have I done, James?” He leans forward and his breath fogs up the Plexiglas. “Cuckoo, cuckoo! And of course the cuckoo is also a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, ticking itself away towards, well, what _are_ you ticking away towards, James? Or don’t you care? Don’t you think that would be best, not caring? I think so. I think even that will go away in time. A needle here, a needle there.”

“What’s he talking about?” Q asks. He’s standing beside Bond and Bond doesn’t know how long he’s been there.

Bond says, “A fairytale. The cuckoo and the prince of needles.”

“I think Disney missed that in its rotation.”

“He made it up when we were boys. The cuckoo brother is the wrong one, the usurper, the one who has the king’s love, but the prince of needles is cleverer, so he takes the cuckoo brother’s skin and sews it up around himself. So he wins, after all.”

“How very _Silence of the Lambs_. What a wonder that his father didn’t like him.”

Franz continues to smile. His teeth are very small and very white.

The mist he had made against the glass fades and when Bond moves, he can make out a very blurry reflection of himself. He is a smudge. Q, next to him, is clearer. He is looking at the Bond-thing and reaching out to touch its elbow. His face is very concerned.

Q is in love with him, Bond suddenly understands.

Q is wanting him to say something.

*

M puts Bond through a series of tests on his coordination. Bond knows his right from his left and his up from his down. He has stopped shaving and visits a barber every morning. Q says he smells like hair tonic and shaving cream. Bond is very careful not to touch him. The cuckoo clock is ticking and he has the feeling of a timer about to hit zero. His whole life has been a long fuse burning down to this.

He has to take psychological screenings as well.

“Home.”

“Flag.”

“Leave.”

“Hotel.”

“Swan.”

“Hotel.”

“Brother.”

“Needle.”

“Red.”

“Blood.”

He doesn’t pass this time. Then again, he didn’t pass last time, either. It occurs to him that it might not be Franz’s chair at all that has done him in. Whatever is wrong with him could have been wrong with him for a long, long time. Maybe he has always been the cuckoo in the nest.

*

“Do you know where the word ‘monster’ comes from, James?”

Bond closes his eyes. He remembers looking into the mirror in the hotel room and seeing Madeleine in bed in the next room, perfectly still. He does remember that. He has no particular feelings about it.

Franz takes his silence as ignorance. “It’s from the Latin for warning. A ‘ _monstrum_ ,’ some portent shown to warn others. _Facebo monstrum tuum_ —I will make a monster of you. _Feci monstrum tuum eis—Angliae_. I have made you a monster to them, to England.” He screws one fingertip into the thin tendons of his throat and laughs. “So simple, always so simple. The bolts through the neck. Very traditional.”

“I should have killed you,” Bond says. Breathes, really. He turns to leave.

“How does your skin feel, James?” Franz calls after him. “Does it really feel like your own? Do you really think that’s you, inside?”

*

M sits him down that afternoon and asks him the last time he saw Madeleine Swann. SPECTRE may have found her, he says. She’s been off the grid for some time.

Bond feels the slippery emptiness between his skin and his bones. He is a body sitting in a chair.

“I don’t know anything,” he says. “I haven’t seen her in so long.”

M pours a drink for him, but he is really pouring a drink for someone else. Bond watches Bond’s fingers wrap around the glass. Bond tosses liquor down Bond’s throat. Bond is remembering a woman surrounded by snow, a woman like a swan, a woman who had been his hope to bleach himself empty and new and blank. He would know her anywhere. His is the only face he cannot remember or identify.

Cuckoo, cuckoo.

The prince of needles.

The alcohol sedates something inside him. How gently it slips down to his belly, like a syringe to the temple. How easy it can be to change the nature of things. He feels quite calm. He is ready for something now. _Le roi est mort, vive le roi._

*

He is kissing Q. Q makes a sound in the back of his throat and grabs onto Bond’s lapels. “If this is a hangover from worry, come back to me later,” Q says against the side of Bond’s neck. His teeth graze where some of the needles went in. Bond’s nerve endings are awake and alert to him.

“I’ll come back to you later,” he says. He cups his hand around the back of Q’s neck. “Tonight.”

Q’s eyes are as wide and as dark as the lid of a barrel; Bond is a rat released into the trees.

“Tonight?” Q says.

“Unless you object.” Bond leans towards him. This has the feel of a very inevitable fall. He can’t remember why he didn’t want this to happen. He can’t remember what he was trying to protect.

“Tonight,” Q says.

*

Bond is standing across the street from Q’s flat. The rain has soaked the roads and turned them into black silk. He is waiting for a light to change. It is green and it needs to turn red. He remembers red and is waiting for red.

In the window of a parked car, he sees the image of himself.

 _Anyone would think that ought to be a warning,_ the Bond-thing thinks.

The light changes. He is going; he is heading inside now.


End file.
